Commercial damn near brought me to tears. Watch it, spread it. (Courtesy INDC Journal)

UPDATE: “Saddam himself was a WMD for Iraq.” And, a Jewish Conspiracy theorist!

Searching MEMRI’s video clips section for “Iraqi elections” pulls up lots of good stuff.

UPDATE UPDATE: Seeing this clip brings me back to one of the first points I ever made (see third post down) on this blog: how come so many other nations (or religions or ethnic groups) seem to hold grudges against one another for hundreds of years? I’m with Josh on this one—it’s in everyone’s self-interest if both the Israelis and Palestinians stop trying to kill one another. Al-Qaradhawi, despite his highly inflammatory overall point, said it himself: there’s nothing fundamentally incompatible between the two religions. It’s just that they still hate each other for things that started hundreds of years ago.

And rather than forget about it, each side continues to do things that piss the other side off; both sides have an insatiable desire to completely own Jerusalem and they’re willing to go the extra kilometer and fight for it. The general xenophobia that seems to exist in that part of the world is certainly a contributing factor. Though Americans can certainly be guilty of xenophobia, it doesn’t seem to cause a civil war, at least not in recent memory.

No, I don’t have a solution. How long did it take the civil rights movement to make an effect on the American conciousness? And the wars that took place in the general chronological vicinity were far-away matters. In the middle of a war on your own soil, with two groups who are overall so hostile to one another, how can the moderates meet in the middle and start the nonviolent revolution of ideas that the region so sorely needs? It seems clear to me that whatever solution finally takes hold in the middle east, it’s something that’s going to have to come from within, and convince the people who can be convinced and marginalize the few that are left.